JP's Blog

11.5.2010

Hello Everyone! This is an initial post to this blog which I have just created. My primary intention here is to describe things I'm working on as a software hacker mostly related to open source and Gnome especially.

I have participated in developing several open source projects like Gnumeric in the past but currently I'm mostly involved in Vala language development. The reason I like Vala is that it provides the modern object oriented language features for a C developer. Binding C APIs into Vala is easy, Vala objects are GObjects which guarantees stable ABI and easy binding from Vala to other lanaguages and there is no speed penalty from byte-code interpretation like in C# and Java. I could go on listing the good things here but probably the most important one is that Vala is open; the source code is available and anybody can extend and improve it. In addition, Vala is still in development phase so things are not fixed in stone at least just yet ;-)